I have been looking into the Polywell stuff.
I got disgusted with fusion some years back. They keep building bigger and bigger tokomaks and never seem to get far. ITER is expect to cost nearly $10 billion and produce, at most, 500 megawatts of thermal energy. Not to mention the fast neutrons because it uses deuterium/tritium. And they won't light it until 2016.
I never heard of Polywell before, though. I have seen some references to inertial electrostatic confinement as a way to use He3 in fusion. After digging into it, I am impressed. WB-6 was built and produced neutrons. Not many were detected because they only had two neutron detectors. The coils were hand-wound and they tended to shift under load. Eventually a coil shorted out and blew the machine up. They were able to get new funding, but Dr. Bussard was in the process of dying of cancer, so it was delayed. Dr. Nebel is now heading the project.
WB-7(the WB stands for wiffle ball) was built and generated first plasma at the first of the year, and by all accounts has been running reliably. The results apparently are being peer reviewed right now. I say "apparently" because all of the researchers are very tight-lipped, but a crew of new people with the proper credentials for a peer review committee are now involved. The goal is to verify the results of WB-6.
If things pan out, they are going to try to get funding for a 3 meter device which should yield 100 megawatts of electricity. Instead of the deuterium/deuterium reaction currently used, they want to use boron-11/hydrogen. Which doesn't yield fast neutrons and most of the energy goes to electricity. They estimate the cost will be $200 million or so and take about 5 years to build. I suspect much of that time is to build the machines to make the coils and things like that.
The downside? The science hasn't been fully vetted. This is an area of physics that was mostly abandoned decades ago. Most of the experts are in their 70s or older. So there is the possibility that there is some hidden "gotchas". Like has plagued tokamaks.
OTOH, the money in question is not huge. But, if it works, the potential is enormous. The machines scale very well, a 3 meter machine yields 100MW, a 4 meter machine yields 1GW and so on. An 8 meter machine, which would be on the scale as a small nuclear plant at about 1GW, should produce 120GW.
Frankly, given the trouble we have gotten into with respect to energy, we should probably give this concept a crash priority. Set up several more labs with WB-7 class machines looking at various fuel types. Go ahead and fund a 3 meter machine. If it doesn't work out, well, that is about 5 hours in Iraq. If it does work out, we could be well on our way to energy independence by the time ITER gets to first plasma.
Small gamble. Reasonable chance of success. Huge rewards. Sounds like a no-brainer.
Which is probably why they won't do it. |
